Exhibitions, United States, New York City, 07 March 2013
Opening at 6pm, Moroso,146 Greene Street, New York, NY 10012.
“Divided, mutilated, incomplete, an enemy to himself is contemporary man; Marx called him “alienated”, Freud “repressed”; a state of old harmony is lost and we long for a new kind of completeness”
Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors, 1952.
Schwitters had already in 1924 turned part of his family home, referred to by him as the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, into a truly sculptural environment –Merzbau- using abstract forms and underground passageways which led to a room where a mannequin of a woman splattered with blood was put on display. A world that appeared, like the dream-like dimension created by Dragana Sapanjoš, to lack apparent necessity and where images undergo continual pollution. In Is always fading useless, superfluous, objects effortlessly reproduce themselves taking the form of overlapping discs, plates, moulds, layers of surfaces, ornaments, jewellery, accessories, liquids and plastic Made in China animals. While Schwitters’ began as a way of building a utopia, this compulsive addition is the result of a stripping away of the layers of consumerism here transfigured into dream, the product of / deposit of non-essential consumer goods which invade the space uninvited. The anthropological space, into which man has fallen, appears to have been transformed into a space of consumption, through which the social system itself is structured and which is subject to such a rate of acceleration that it appears to offer itself as the sole area of existence. The results are the feelings of solitude and the avalanches of anxiety, consequences of a frustrated knowledge of the world, that pervade the totem-cakes of Sapanjoš. The artist senses this fracture, attempting on the one hand to weld together the conscious and unconscious through the reconciling dialectic of perception and representation, and, on the other, to condense the world into the object and its circumstances, loading it with self-significance in a Dadaist mould.
Sapanjoš, with natural ease, adds to these perspectives: she sets herself a greater all-encompassing task which still falls under the basic principle of unveiling, that of revealing the multi-layered, emotional and intellectual components of 'making art'. ‘Dragana’s cakes' are a composition where new meaning ferments, a way of anthropomorphically reconstructing how man perceives the world. The artist relentlessly constructs objects or signifiers of objects, she accumulates external signs of her own making and the signs of a new process for a movement that breathes life into the vital, viral, impulses of the individual. These antirepressive objects trigger a mechanism of libertine liberation because the relationship with the object is tendentially not authoritarian but rather an eradication of all partiality: it is no longer the artefact which is to be consumed but rather the individual to be moulded through the activation of the senses effectuated by the piece.
Sapanjoš‘s work Is always fading thus acquires a function, it is a carrier and transmitter of emotion, an endemic flux that breaks apart our habitual way of being and alters our position in the world. Conceived as part of a whole, a genuine fragment of a collective happening, it is the essence and sedimentation of a passing moment made permanent, an ongoing transfusion of the artist’s imaginative energy towards society at large.
Andrea Bruciati
“Divided, mutilated, incomplete, an enemy to himself is contemporary man; Marx called him “alienated”, Freud “repressed”; a state of old harmony is lost and we long for a new kind of completeness”
Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors, 1952.
Schwitters had already in 1924 turned part of his family home, referred to by him as the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, into a truly sculptural environment –Merzbau- using abstract forms and underground passageways which led to a room where a mannequin of a woman splattered with blood was put on display. A world that appeared, like the dream-like dimension created by Dragana Sapanjoš, to lack apparent necessity and where images undergo continual pollution. In Is always fading useless, superfluous, objects effortlessly reproduce themselves taking the form of overlapping discs, plates, moulds, layers of surfaces, ornaments, jewellery, accessories, liquids and plastic Made in China animals. While Schwitters’ began as a way of building a utopia, this compulsive addition is the result of a stripping away of the layers of consumerism here transfigured into dream, the product of / deposit of non-essential consumer goods which invade the space uninvited. The anthropological space, into which man has fallen, appears to have been transformed into a space of consumption, through which the social system itself is structured and which is subject to such a rate of acceleration that it appears to offer itself as the sole area of existence. The results are the feelings of solitude and the avalanches of anxiety, consequences of a frustrated knowledge of the world, that pervade the totem-cakes of Sapanjoš. The artist senses this fracture, attempting on the one hand to weld together the conscious and unconscious through the reconciling dialectic of perception and representation, and, on the other, to condense the world into the object and its circumstances, loading it with self-significance in a Dadaist mould.
Sapanjoš, with natural ease, adds to these perspectives: she sets herself a greater all-encompassing task which still falls under the basic principle of unveiling, that of revealing the multi-layered, emotional and intellectual components of 'making art'. ‘Dragana’s cakes' are a composition where new meaning ferments, a way of anthropomorphically reconstructing how man perceives the world. The artist relentlessly constructs objects or signifiers of objects, she accumulates external signs of her own making and the signs of a new process for a movement that breathes life into the vital, viral, impulses of the individual. These antirepressive objects trigger a mechanism of libertine liberation because the relationship with the object is tendentially not authoritarian but rather an eradication of all partiality: it is no longer the artefact which is to be consumed but rather the individual to be moulded through the activation of the senses effectuated by the piece.
Sapanjoš‘s work Is always fading thus acquires a function, it is a carrier and transmitter of emotion, an endemic flux that breaks apart our habitual way of being and alters our position in the world. Conceived as part of a whole, a genuine fragment of a collective happening, it is the essence and sedimentation of a passing moment made permanent, an ongoing transfusion of the artist’s imaginative energy towards society at large.
Andrea Bruciati
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